He acted like he’s working.

https://www.inuth.com/trends/social-virals/watch-donald-trump-clean-toilets-wait-tables-and-do-other-odd-jobs-at-his-own-hotel/

He must’ve killed the coverage to avoid dis-impressing his moronic horde.

Altercation: Toying With Treason

A short history of Republicans’ long history of selling out the U.S. to help them win the White House

BY ERIC ALTERMAN
The American Prospect, JULY 30, 2021

EXCERPT…

Another episode of possibly treasonous GOP skullduggery remains a little murky to this day—and may have been far more significant than anyone realized at the time. This was the so-called “October Surprise” that either did or didn’t occur during the election of 1980. At issue here was the Iranian government’s holding 56 American diplomats hostage, as Jimmy Carter—whom Reagan was endeavoring to unseat—worked to set them free. As Kai Bird recounts in his much-praised new biography of Jimmy Carter, The Outlier, William Casey, Reagan’s campaign chief and later his CIA director, “was a busy man in the summer of 1980.” Just after Reagan fought off a last-minute challenge from Gerald Ford to win his party’s presidential nomination, Casey took time from the campaign to travel to London, allegedly to give a paper at a conference on the history of the Second World War. (Casey had served in the OSS, the CIA’s WWII predecessor.) Casey flew on the Eastern Air Lines shuttle from Washington, D.C., to New York City on July 25, and his speech was scheduled for 9:30 a.m. on July 29. Casey was absent when the London conference opened on July 28. His whereabouts between these dates, as Bird shows us, are “unaccounted for by any travel records.”

Where was Casey on the 26th and 27th? According to a deposition given by Iranian businessman Jamshid Hashemi to the House Task Force on the October Surprise in 1992, Casey flew to Madrid to meet with a representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Mehdi Karrubi, a meeting orchestrated by Hashemi and his brother Cyrus. The two men had longtime connections to both the Khomeini regime and the CIA. Bird writes: “[T]wo meetings were held between Casey and the Ayatollah Karrubi in a lavish suite at Madrid’s Hotel Ritz. Jamshid later told Ted Koppel on ABC’s Nightline, ‘Casey said the Iranians should hold the hostages until after the election … and the new Reagan administration would feel favorably towards Iran, releasing military equipment and the frozen Iranian assets.’” This is, needless to say, exactly what happened.

Extremely conveniently for all the Reagan administration Iran-Contra criminals looking for a fall guy, CIA chief Casey died of a brain tumor in 1987, not long after that crazy scheme was first (partially) discovered. In 1992, as President George H.W. Bush faced a tough battle for re-election, Rep. Lee Hamilton and his House Task Force on the October Surprise sought to uncover what actually had happened in the fall of 1980. They didn’t get very far: After Casey died, his 1980 passport somehow disappeared. His calendar turned up, but guess what? The pages for July 26–27, 1980, had gone missing. Investigative reporter Robert Parry (who died of pancreatic cancer in early 2018) later found a State Department memo in the archives of the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library mentioning “a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown.” Bird calls this “damning evidence that Bill Casey did indeed make that side trip from London to Madrid in late July 1980.” What’s more, Bird adds, “the Bush White House deputy counsel knew of this evidence—but it was never turned over” to Hamilton’s committee. Why not? It turns out that Bush’s White House counsel C. Boyden Gray had “convened a meeting to discuss how they should handle the new evidence. Gray said the October Surprise investigation was ‘of special interest to the President.’ It was essential, he told his staff, that there be ‘no Surprises to the White House.’” Why was that? The investigation, he insisted, was—wait for it—“partisan.”

Bush had gone on a pardoning spree upon becoming president in 1988 in order to continue the cover-up of the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Reagan administration (in which Bush had been vice president) had secretly sold arms to Iran, using the proceeds to fund the Contras’ war against the Nicaraguan government. Among the pardoned were genocide-enabler Elliott Abrams and other officials still under investigation by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh. When revelations in former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger’s diaries appeared to implicate Bush himself, Weinberger received a pardon before a jury could decide on his guilt or innocence. This marked, as a furious Walsh later noted, “the first time a president ever pardoned someone in whose trial he might have been called as a witness.”

CONTINUES…

https://prospect.org/politics/altercation-toying-with-treason/

From Cato’s New Yorker article:

Reynolds was there because the Rules Committee had begun investigating a scandal revolving around John-son’s protégé Robert G. (Bobby) Baker, whom Johnson, during his years as Senate Majority Leader, had made Secretary for the Majority. During the preceding two months, the scandal had been escalating week by week. In a desperate attempt to head off the investigation, Baker had resigned (he later said that if he had talked “Johnson might have incurred a mortal wound by these revelations. They could have . . . driven him from office”), but the resignation had only ignited a media firestorm that broke on newspaper front pages across the country and in sensational cover stories in major news magazines. The scandal had thus far concentrated on the man known in Washington as “Little Lyndon,” but the stories were beginning to focus more and more on Johnson himself. On the Monday of the week that Kennedy left for Texas, a lengthy and detailed article had appeared in Life—“scandal grows and grows in washington,” based on the work of a nine-member investigating team headed by a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, William G. Lambert. It had gone beyond a recounting of Baker’s personal financial saga to make clear that, in distributing campaign contributions and in his other Senate activities, Baker had simply been “Lyndon’s bluntest instrument in running the show.” And the focus was about to sharpen that morning. Reynolds, who was Baker’s former business partner, had come to Room 312 to tell the Senate investigators about a number of Baker’s activities, one of which—the purchase of television advertising time and an expensive stereo set, in return for the writing of an insurance policy—Baker himself later called “a kickback pure and simple,” to Johnson. On the advice of his attorney, Reynolds had brought with him documents—invoices and cancelled checks—that he said would prove that assertion. Another of Baker’s activities that Reynolds began describing that morning would also turn out to be related to Johnson: an overpayment by Matthew McCloskey, a contractor and major Democratic funder, for a performance bond—an overpayment of a hundred and nine thousand dollars for a bond that had cost only seventy-three thousand dollars, with twenty-five thousand dollars of that overpayment, Reynolds later said, going to “Mr. Johnson’s campaign.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene accuses Lauren Boebert of 'high school drama'-like behavior on Twitter

by Maya Boddie
Alternet.org, December 20, 2022

Conservative GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert publicly slammed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene during a recent Turning Point USA conference, after Greene confirmed her support of Kevin McCarthy for House Speaker, HuffPost reports.

Boebert told the audience, “I’ve been aligned with Marjorie and accused of believing a lot of the things that she believes in. I don’t believe in this just like I don’t believe in ... Jewish space lasers.”

Greene gave a rebuttal for the Colorado congresswoman in Twitter thread form, noting Boebert “just barely” won her midterm race.

Greene tweeted, “I’ve supported and donated to Lauren Boebert. President Trump has supported and donated to Lauren Boebert. Kevin McCarthy has supported and donated to Lauren Boebert. She just barely came through by 500 votes.”

Greene continued, “She gladly takes our $ but when she’s been asked: Lauren refuses to endorse President Trump, she refuses to support Kevin McCarthy, and she childishly threw me under the bus for a cheap sound bite.”

Continues…

https://www.alternet.org/marjorie-taylor-greene-lauren-boebert/

Ha ha. Not the Onion: These are members of the US Congress.

The Haves and the Have-Yachts

Luxury ships attract outrage and political scrutiny. The ultra-rich are buying them in record numbers.

By Evan Osnos
The New Yorker, July 18, 2022

In the Victorian era, it was said that the length of a man’s boat, in feet, should match his age, in years. The Victorians would have had some questions at the fortieth annual Palm Beach International Boat Show, which convened this March on Florida’s Gold Coast. A typical offering: a two-hundred-and-three-foot superyacht named Sea Owl, selling secondhand for ninety million dollars. The owner, Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund tycoon and Republican donor, was throwing in furniture and accessories, including several auxiliary boats, a Steinway piano, a variety of frescoes, and a security system that requires fingerprint recognition. Nevertheless, Mercer’s package was a modest one; the largest superyachts are more than five hundred feet, on a scale with naval destroyers, and cost six or seven times what he was asking.

Excerpt…

For the uninitiated, a pleasure boat the length of a football field can be bewildering. Andy Cohen, the talk-show host, recalled his first visit to a superyacht owned by the media mogul Barry Diller: “I was like the Beverly Hillbillies.” The boats have grown so vast that some owners place unique works of art outside the elevator on each deck, so that lost guests don’t barge into the wrong stateroom.

Excerpt…

Nobody can say precisely how many of Putin’s associates own superyachts—known to professionals as “white boats”—because the white-boat world is notoriously opaque. Owners tend to hide behind shell companies, registered in obscure tax havens, attended by private bankers and lawyers. But, with unusual alacrity, authorities have used subpoenas and police powers to freeze boats suspected of having links to the Russian élite. In Spain, the government detained a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar yacht associated with Sergei Chemezov, the head of the conglomerate Rostec, whose bond with Putin reaches back to their time as K.G.B. officers in East Germany. (As in many cases, the boat is not registered to Chemezov; the official owner is a shell company connected to his stepdaughter, a teacher whose salary is likely about twenty-two hundred dollars a month.) In Germany, authorities impounded the world’s most voluminous yacht, Dilbar, for its ties to the mining-and-telecom tycoon Alisher Usmanov. And in Italy police have grabbed a veritable armada, including a boat owned by one of Russia’s richest men, Alexei Mordashov, and a colossus suspected of belonging to Putin himself, the four-hundred-and-fifty-nine-foot Scheherazade.

Excerpt…

O’Shannassy has come to see big boats as a space where powerful “solar systems” converge and combine. “It is implicit in every interaction that their sharing of information will benefit both parties; it is an obsession with billionaires to do favours for each other. A referral, an introduction, an insight—it all matters,” he wrote in “Superyacht Captain,” a new memoir. A guest told O’Shannassy that, after a lavish display of hospitality, he finally understood the business case for buying a boat. “One deal secured on board will pay it all back many times over,” the guest said, “and it is pretty hard to say no after your kids have been hosted so well for a week.”

Continues…

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/25/the-haves-and-the-have-yachts

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his sister Rory Kennedy told Charlie Rose that their father, the Attorney General of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy, believed there was a conspiracy behind the death of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. For the first time in almost 50 years, members of the slain president's family were about their father's thoughts about the assassination.

(ARCHIVE) https://web.archive.org/web/20130114120047/https://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57563645/rfk-jr-dad-believed-warren-commission-shoddy/

The story made news, as it were, for a day or two -- it was on page 8 here in Detroit (try finding it using The Free Press or Detroit News web site search engines) -- and apart from several threads on DU, that's about it as coverage goes. The Charlie Rose interview was part of a program put together by the media and good people in Dallas to celebrate JFK's life.

What bothers me about the media coverage is the constant attack, not on the government's lousy investigation of the assassination and its attendant cover-up, but, rather, the attack on anyone who brings up the subject of conspiracy in the death of the president, even when it's children of attorney general who also was the brother of the slain president.

Check out this condescending piece of opinion from the Dallas Observer:



Me, I don't believe any of that stuff was "out there." Why writer Betsy Lewis chooses to believe what the media tell her is true I'll guess lies in allegiance to a pay check.

Likewise for the lack of coverage given the story in the national media, where the same few corporations that swore up and down there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, both in 1990 and 2002, now want no part of "conspiracy talk" during the 50th anniversary observance. So far, as far as I'm aware, the Charlie Rose program has not aired.

What's more telling is what didn't get noted in the nation's corrupt mass media at all: The fact that Attorney General and later Senator Robert F. Kennedy also was assassinated. Some think that was a coincidence, because the mass media told them so. One thing's for certain, the questions still surrounding the deaths of two liberal icons doesn't get discussed at all today in our supposedly "free press."

Above is a 2013 OP from DU:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10022416498

The original links above now go to the Internet Archive Waybac.

FTR: I stand with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Boof Boy



Brett Kavanaugh Raises Ethics Concerns After Attending Holiday Party With Ex-Trump Officials, Hard Righters

By Ken Meyer
Mediate, December 13, 2022

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s judicial ethics came under scrutiny after it was reported that he attended a holiday party with former Donald Trump officials and numerous other prominent right-wing operatives.

Politico Playbook reported on a Christmas party held on Friday at the home of American Conservative Union leader Matt Schlapp and his wife, Trump White House Director of Strategic Communications Mercedes Schlapp. Kavanaugh was at the top of the guest list, among several other prominent names flagged by Politico.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Ginger Gaetz, Sean Spicer, Alex Acosta, Sebastian Gorka, Stephen and Katie Miller, Chad Wolf, Greta Van Susteren and John Coale, Laura Schlapp and Bryan Wells, Brendan Carr, Rep.-elect George Santos (R-NY), Erin and Nick Perrine, Erik Prince, Ziad Ojakli, Peter Davidson, Steve Holland and Ben Terris.

Bloomberg noted that Kavanaugh’s attendance lends to concerns about his involvement in partisan activities, especially when the trust in the Supreme Court has been in a continuous decline, according to recent polls. Supreme Court justices are frequently critiqued for attending functions that coincide with their political views.

Continues…

https://www.mediaite.com/news/brett-kavanaugh-raises-ethics-concerns-after-attending-holiday-party-with-ex-trump-officials-hard-righters/

“Beer. I like beer.”

DU from 2013…

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1002528054

No wonder Dimdonnie said: “We fell in love.” And told the little dictator, “I think your country has tremendous economic potential, unbelievable, unlimited.”



Trump did not disclose $19.8m loan while president, documents show

The loan from Daewoo, a company with ties to North Korea, should have been reported in public financial disclosures

by Maya Yang
The Guardian, December 5, 2022

Donald Trump failed to disclose a $19.8m loan from a company with historical ties to North Korea, while he was the US president, according to a new report.

Documents obtained by the New York attorney general, and reported by Forbes, on Sunday indicate a previously unreported loan owed by Trump to Daewoo, the South Korean conglomerate.

Daewoo was the only South Korean company allowed to operate a business in North Korea during the mid-1990s.

Forbes revealed that Trump’s relationship with Daewoo is at least 25 years old. At one point, Daewoo partnered with Trump on a development project near the United Nations headquarters in New York City, Trump World Tower.

Trump and Daewoo continued to do business together, including using Trump’s name on six South Korea-based properties from 1999 to 2007, according to the magazine.

Continues…

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/05/donald-trump-daewoo-loan-financial-disclosure

I hope I wouldn’t smile if I owed an evil rat $20 million smackers.